This invention relates to an apparatus and method for achieving an advantageous affect on the flow paths of fluid flow in a pipe. The invention is particularly useful for effective static mixing of a plurality of fluids flowing in a pipe. As used herein, the term "Static Mixer" refers to a mixer which requires no moving parts to cause the mixing effect.
Prior Static Mixers typically employ a large number of baffles mounted within a fluid flow receiving pipeline. These mixers are particularly ineffective in mixing volumes of fluid which are longitudinally separated from one another in the pipeline. This problem sometimes occurs in the environment of refineries, for example, which utilize static mixers to mix various combustible gases from different sources (i.e. from fuel gas pipelines, waste gases from other processes, etc.) for the purpose of combusting such a mixture in steam boilers and furnaces. Because of varying flow rates from the gas sources and/or because of injection of the different gases into the pipeline at longitudinally separated locations, "slugs" or volumes of different, relatively unmixed gases can become widely separated longitudinally in the pipeline, thereby causing the possibility of a potentially hazardous, wildly fluctuating flame in the burner of the furnace or boiler due to different heating values of the gases. The problem of a fluctuating flame due to ineffective mixing of the combustible gases can also occur in an incinerator.
Furthermore, prior Static Mixers as described above can be extremely noisy due to the turbulence created by the baffles, and even more importantly, the baffles in such mixers cause a significant head loss and consequent decrease in flow rate.